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I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

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Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#181

Post by pdimitar »

estebank wrote: post #127
throw14082020 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is in a sweet spot where it is often used to compete with both groups: [Rust, C/C++] and [Node, Python, Ruby, etc]. The reason GP said it is probably because of Garbage collection. I've done a bit of Rust in my job, and there are some basic things that Rust doesn't have going for it: - steep learning curve (this means for the first 6 months, you or your colleagues are unproductive, write bad Rust which your compan…

> - bad error messages (even though that was a focus for the rust team!) I would love to hear more! (If you have the time.)

Not the fault of Rust compiler per se but in my case the errors that mismatching trait impls from async libraries yield can be downright suicide-inducing.

I recognize this is not entirely on rustc though.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#182

Post by dcow »

I don't agree. I think the author is conflating two things:

1. learning Rust, and 2. using Rust.

If you take away "Rust made us slow because our team had to learn how to use it and thus we had slow iterations and it's harder to find hires with Rust knowledge" from the equation, then you aren't left with much argument against using Rust early.

The iteration time issue with Rust is solved by experience. We use Rust and our iteration times are average. What we gain is not performance, that's not a reason we use Rust (for an early stage startup, totally agree you burn credits until you can afford to care). We gain correctness. And at an early stage, correctness without paying for a massive QA team is a huge boon.

There are definitely more mature tools for quickly standing up CRUD APIs. If you want a framework that can bootstrap you into an OpenAPI with docgen, swagger, all the bells and whistles, Rust doesn't do that. But Rust will help force you to write correct code that never crashes and handles edge cases it's easy to forget about when moving fast in a duck typed language.

The only language we seriously considered over Rust was Swift. But Swift's just wasn't quite there yet. It might be today. If I was starting something from ground zero today, I'd probably lean towards Swift and need to be argued down back to Rust or Python.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#183

Post by nazka »

brimstedt wrote: post #172
ozten wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NodeJS kind of muddies the waters. It ate a lot of use cases that would have previously been done in Java. That created conflict between backend teams that wanted statically typed code and a "boring" tech choice against "full stack" developers creating a backend service. I think Rust will see a lot of adoption in web services that are glorified CRUD APIs. It would have been a poor choice to do many of these workloads…

I've really tried to give js/ts in backend a go. Both by nodejs and deno. And by kickstarting my own projects as well as diving into experienced nodejs developers' code. I really don't see how anyone choses nodejs/deno to anything. Java imo gives you much less trouble, is more stable, has a working (!!!) Unit testing setup and exceptional runtime. Next on my list is to give rust a go, since I'm intrigued by its featu…

You should try NestJS with Prisma or Typeorm and Postgres. Plus all the classic other stuff. It's a great stack.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#184

Post by dboreham »

oauea wrote: post #169
dboreham wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes matters, e.g. when you deploy new code.

Not really, just do a rolling deployment like you should be doing anyway. No one cares if the new version takes 1 millisecond to start up or 3 seconds because they literally won't notice.

Rolling deployment is a hack imho. Adds complexity and hence yet more potential failure modes.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#185

Post by mcronce »

dirheist wrote: post #152
ozten wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NodeJS kind of muddies the waters. It ate a lot of use cases that would have previously been done in Java. That created conflict between backend teams that wanted statically typed code and a "boring" tech choice against "full stack" developers creating a backend service. I think Rust will see a lot of adoption in web services that are glorified CRUD APIs. It would have been a poor choice to do many of these workloads…

Wouldn't you just use go/python/node for a simple crud API? fastapi for python is pretty performative if you use gunicorn as your runtime and time to iterate is must faster than it is in rust.

It depends exactly how simple that CRUD API is. If there's any business logic, I'd rather get all the cheap correctness guarantees that Rust provides. I don't find myself making many truly dumb CRUD APIs.

Time to iterate is also only much faster in certain situations, e.g. local development; if you have to e.g. build a container image, push to a registry, and redeploy to a k8s cluster somewhere, those savings become somewhere between less significant and nonexistent.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#186

Post by dboreham »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #173
dboreham wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes matters, e.g. when you deploy new code.

How would real-world JVM startup times matter in deployments?

You exec a process expecting it to begin operating, providing some networked service, in a reasonable time. Instead it doesn't do that. It spends tens of seconds, sometimes minutes, running JIT and other sundry startup overhead.

You may not have seen this if you haven't used Scala...

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#187

Post by spullara »

ozten wrote: post #113
zeroxfe wrote: post #37

If you're thinking about building something in Rust, a good question to ask is, "what would I use if Rust didn't exist?" If your answer is something like Go or Node.js, then Rust is probably not the right choice. If your answer is C or C++ or something similar, then Rust is very likely the right choice. Obv, there are always exceptions here, but this helps you work through things a bit more objectively. Rust can be a…

NodeJS kind of muddies the waters. It ate a lot of use cases that would have previously been done in Java. That created conflict between backend teams that wanted statically typed code and a "boring" tech choice against "full stack" developers creating a backend service. I think Rust will see a lot of adoption in web services that are glorified CRUD APIs. It would have been a poor choice to do many of these workloads…

The latter use case is terrible for Rust.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#188

Post by oconnor663 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I can't get it why people would prefer to add "?" to everything instead of just having exceptions which automate that behavior. In the bad old days of C there were two kinds of programs: programs without correct error handling, and programs where half the loc are unhappy paths that do what exceptions do... with a huge amount of work. Today people are repeating the same mistakes of the past, putting a "?" on everythin…

I mean, ask the C++ community. They've had exceptions forever, but a large chunk of them forbid exceptions in their codebases.

I think there's a pretty good rule of thumb in modern systems-ish language design: If Go and Rust and Zig all do a certain thing, that thing is probably a great idea. These languages have very different priorities, but often they overlap.

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#189

Post by pdntspa »

brimstedt wrote: post #172
ozten wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NodeJS kind of muddies the waters. It ate a lot of use cases that would have previously been done in Java. That created conflict between backend teams that wanted statically typed code and a "boring" tech choice against "full stack" developers creating a backend service. I think Rust will see a lot of adoption in web services that are glorified CRUD APIs. It would have been a poor choice to do many of these workloads…

I've really tried to give js/ts in backend a go. Both by nodejs and deno. And by kickstarting my own projects as well as diving into experienced nodejs developers' code. I really don't see how anyone choses nodejs/deno to anything. Java imo gives you much less trouble, is more stable, has a working (!!!) Unit testing setup and exceptional runtime. Next on my list is to give rust a go, since I'm intrigued by its featu…

And the IDEs which practically write your code for you. I mean yeah Java is so verbose but most of that word vomit is me just tabbing through autocomplete

I went back and prototyped a slightly similar app in Python w/ a gui toolkit and I felt like I was driving through exception city. I have made my career writing in dynamic languages so I forgot just how pleasant it was to write in a static one!

Re: I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

#190

Post by apozem »

Ylmaz wrote: post #143

I like this quote from 'The art of Unix Programming' published in 2003 "While it still makes sense to write system programs and time-critical kernels of applications in C or C++, the world has changed a great deal since these languages came to prominence in the 1980s. In 2003, processors are a thousand times faster, memories are a thousand times larger, and disks are a factor of ten thousand larger, for roughly const…

That's a great way of looking at it. Languages all have benefits and drawbacks, but you have to consider whether they help you for your problem.

One time, I met a guy who wrote firmware for Seagate hard drives. Any new feature he added had a budget measured in microseconds. Obviously he wrote nothing but C++.

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